Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
I personally don’t eat red meat, and I agree it’s worse for climate change, but I’ve heard the argument that meat from larger animals is more ethical, because to get the same amount of meat from smaller animals means a much larger number of them have to die, and I’m not sure how to weigh that against the climate, assuming that someone isn’t going to give up meat entirely.
That doesn’t add up at all because cattle ranches are notoriously known for pretty low quality of life environments if they arent pasture raised or free range
Then again that basically goes for all farm animals that aren’t considered free range, but it’s a lot easier to have free range chickens than it is to have cows doing the same.
The solution for meat eaters is something like a farm co-op where you can literally drive by your food and see how it is. We used to buy half a cow from a local farmer and his cows were in nice fields etc.
this is why i think chicken is the best meat, no other animal is so easy and normal to literally raise in your backyard, plus they can get a decent amount of their food from bugs and foodscraps
it’s entirely feasible for basically everyone with a yard to own chickens and call the butcher when they get too old to lay eggs (or just near death), and this would make eggs basically free and meat very cheap, plus massive quantities of free fertilizer for farmers!
Yes, this is the gold standard (owning your own food sources) but owning your own land has become vanishingly rare these days
there’s still a lot of people who live in a place with a yard, and if most of them come together to require the ability to keep chickens there then it’ll be untenable for that permission to be denied by HOAs/landlords/local government